Twelve long angry days of rage and drink had done nothing but lighten his wallet and alienate some more friends. As he fell backwards into his apartment and listened to the wild African drums blasting on repeat from the stereo, he felt at home. The dirt, the despair and the decadence and wanton waste of everything that characterised his selfish, perfect life surrounded him, from the stench of abandoned cheese and meat to the cd player left on full volume for over a week. Yes, he was home. He ran a dirty and cut hand through his somehow clean hair. He turned the music down and fell back onto a sofa, rising again to sweep the mess off it with his arm.

He closed his eyes, aching from lack of sleep, and crossed his legs. The smells of his flat swam around his head. Rotting food and stale beer and wine, old incense sticks and cigarette smoke brought back memories and shivers. He swam back into sleep and a hint of a smile played onto his face and dreams greeted him like old and close friend.

The early evening chill had crept into his throat and hugged his clothes to him, there must have been a window open he thought. There wasn’t, he’d forgotten to close the front door. Someone was making dinner from the smell. He opened his eyes. Candles were burning and incense beside. Thin clouds of smoke stretched lazily across the room. He sat up. The smell had changed. Whoever was cooking had cleaned. He hoped it wasn’t his mother. It would be just like the old bitch to try an’ own his hangover.

He felt into the crumpled tweed pocket of his jacket for a fag, then to his trousers. He’d slept on them and half were broken. Still, he lit one and stood to find out what was cooking.

Jim fell and fell, and tumbled over, head over heels. Below him clouds and above him blue sky, and these images followed one another in rapid succession as he fell. Wind rushed in his ears. He punched his leg to make sure he was awake and this movement sent him tumbling again. He was on his back, looking at the sky above him, and the clouds took him by surprise when he entered them, the sudden cold and greyness, the wetness covering his face and dampening his jeans right through, turning them dark blue. His jacket clung to him. He finally breathed, sucking in the damp air through his mouth. And then he was out the other side and the ground green and brown and yellow was grabbing out for him. He pulled at his backpack and suddenly it wrenched him up, as the silk unfolded and slowed him. It was his first ever solo jump and he laughed and laughed.

Sometimes there’s no need for a brutal ending.

Across town, in an office above a shoe repair shop, Joe McSavage lit different cigarette and ripped the yellowed nicotine patch off his shoulder. He sat sweating in his vest, his shirt and jacket were on the other side of the room, hanging on the same hook his hat was propped on. The walls were moulding and in the corner under the bin the floor boards were rotted away. The small army issue camp bed were he slept since the eviction last month was covered in sheets of paper and crime scene photos. He was barking up the wrong tree on that one, but the tree he’d chosen wore a short skirt and no pants. He’d bark a while longer.

He sat down and flipped up the screen on his laptop. No new messages. No fucking nothing. Over head thunder rolled. It was a weird night, it want to rain but didn’t have the energy, so it barked. Fucking lame weather. He went over the details again. Nothing seemed out of place. Maybe it was suicide. That was the official line anyway. But then, that wasn’t really an option. No one shoots themselves 7 times in the back of the head with a 6 shooter. Fucking lame case. No money, just a junky ex-girlfriend terrified out her wits, when she weren’t out of her tree. Still it kept his mind fresh and working.

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Times wus hard. Real hard.
When I had ta sell Molley, I made sure and promised her I’d take care a tha kids.
‘Steve’, she said, ‘Steve’, tears collectin’ in her eyes as some mother gunned a muscle car, readin’ to take her away.
‘Take care a little Suzie and Steve Jr. You’ll watch em close now for me won’t ya?’
I could hardly talk for the lump in my throat.
‘I sure will honey,’ I said, promising to do my best by our fine pair a young-uns.

Well, times they do get harder. A man can get sick, soul sick, so no doctor ‘ill cure em. Sick a workin, and sick a tha sight a himself in the mirror. Shit I did my best, but like I say, pretty soon it got hard and I had to start thinkin’ a possibilities.
Time come I’d done all a man could do to keep it together, and it just wasn’t near good enough. So I had to consider the unthinkable. I had to prepare myself ta sell Steve Jr. Exceptin’ this time, my old pal Billy-Ray, whose been a good old boy through all recent troubles and all my troubles past, he says..

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In the quiet of the basement, Garvin readied his machine. It was round and flat, shelled in hard plastic, with a thin wide gap like the mouth of a clam. High up on the wall, half open skylights let drizzle through to wet the basement floor. On the old steel work-bench his calculations sat, twinkling on heaps of unlined paper. It was finished.

As he slipped into a figure-hugging silken body sock, Garvin Erasmus wondered at the future. He’d picked a hundred years ahead, enough time he hoped for profound, but comprehensible change. A dizzying melody of maybes ran through his head. Would America, perhaps the world, have fallen under the jack boot of Christian fascism; handmaidens waiting on feudal patriarchs and gays stoned in the streets, in a grimly literalist theocracy?
Perhaps nuclear attacks or a pandemic will have reduced the world to barbarism, he thought darkly. There were of course countless predicted futures. In preparation for the trip he’d read them all, from Alvin Toffler to Ray Kurzweil.
The singularity too was possible, a rapture of the geeks. Man empowered by the titanic potential of superhuman AI, to transform the world around him. Clouds of nanobots constructing real objects in concrete software. That, or a grey all consuming goo. A part of Garvin expected to emerge in space, the earth consumed for fuel by her departing children.

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Butterfingers perched despondently in his highchair. His slick, waist length hair cresting the seatback, a brunette film. His dirty face was streaked with tears. Once more the voice came, dulled by the heavy oaken door.
‘Choody? Choody it’s me’.
Butterfingers shivered, and not for the first time, or the last, wished he still had a mouth.
‘Choody, please. Why don’t you answer?’
Wearily, he dropped to the foor, and padded once again to the old thick-planked door. His brothers voice was plaintive, and Butterfingers was sufuced with burning shame. Once more he pawed the handle futilely, once more it dripped with dairy essence. He slammed the chode of his bonce against the door, and would have keened, but couldn’t. That voice again, so supple..
‘Choody, I’ve a fierce yearn to love you. Choody!’
The tromp of legs stalking away. He took his chair again. Alone.

Cooth, uncooth, cooth, uncooth. Hello, whats this? It’s been a while since I’ve witnessed such brazen fuckwittery at the ministry of chum!
‘Jenkins’, I yell, levering the machine to a screechy halt. Out he trots from some unionized cubby, round maw loose and crabbed with gammy din.
‘Jenkins, you pillock’, I bellow, checking him short.
Up and down the line, the minions wait, craning under the great presses and shivering blades, to catch the fuss.
‘What’s the meaning of this?’, I ask quietly.
Thugging a digit to his pudge. He looks obediently down at the belt, where a fresh poo lies, imperfect.
‘Looks awrite ta me sir’, he stammers, picking at the brill creamed quiff under his flat cap.
‘Count the rings’, I tell him, with inhuman patience.
‘I’m sorry Mr. Thrustlewhait?’
‘Count’, I repeat, pinching his scruff and smuging him to the churl; rubbing his nose in it.
‘The rings!’
Released, he springs back into place, sways a little, and bends over, broken Jack in the box.
‘There are seven rings, are there not Jenkins?’
‘Aye sir’, he pants, scrunching cap in hand like wash rag. His snout is red at nib from where it tipped the melty.
‘And how many rings should there be?’, I ask, cuffing him pointedly about the hear lobe.
‘Seven sir’, he blugs, huffing back the wa wa’s.
‘I don’t have to tell you, Jenkins’, I tell him, bellying up to the wee smurf, whose noodles gone all red and puffed with yikes.
‘..that I will not have inferior artificial poos, leaving my factory’.
He shakes a no, the chubbed mug, and I flick his bloody snot plug for good measure.
You just can’t get the help.

Squeeky. Squeaky clean? Squeaky Fromm? What does that even mean? Squeeky, in foot high letters on the ridged steel shutter of a doorway. The building’s blue, and long, with a clockface missing handles in between two tidy windows. It reminds me of the buildings in the Yellow Submarine.

A couple wander down the street, quiet in white tracksuits, plus on him, dark leather jacket. He craddles their child, murmering something, maybe in Russian, as she pushes an empty stroller.

A group of Chinese head in to the town, eight guys for every girl, dressed like money; but so tacky, two decades behind. I wonder if in twenty years, my kids will grin and saunter down a street in Shanghai or Hong Kong, migrant workers, rubes.

The street is soaked in dirt, but smells of nothing. Tatty buildings yawing, sagging, sitting, falling oh so slowly. In the quiet of the city, in the coffee coloured night. Where am I waiting?

Oh! And OH!

Never had i felt such an uncontrolled rush of indulgence! I gazed over the sea of bald patches, combovers and creeping hairlines and my heart thumped a hidden warmth! It was as if each one had been varnished with a coat of Ronseal High Gloss laquer. I could imagine licking each one and sucking the dying follicles of the surrounding hairs. I wanted to dress each polished globe with a hat or even hats, teasing myself with each tilt, eventually grabbing them by the ears and running my sweaty fingers all over the surface - at once massaging a little too roughly and gently caressing the aggrivated skin.

OH!

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It’s well known fact that I, Quim La Douche, am drawn, like a fish to a lovely bait, to strong women; and my current interviewee is no exception. Her firm grip on international relations has a hard tug on my loins, and we’re only ten minutes into the interview.

Born Conchita Maria Elvira Gonzalez, Albright’s path to international power brokeress was a strange one. In fact, much of the first forty years of her life were spent in menial servitude, as live in maid to Columbian impresario Pablo Baresco.
“You must have seen a lot of dirty laundry”, I yell above the surf, as our boards crest a thirty footer off Waimea.

Stunning in a neoprene Gucci wet suit, she hits an aerial barrel roll, the feet which burnt cheeky hoof prints into the corridors of power, rooted to her Bilabong, like willows.

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